by Harvey Kraft
All sutras of the Declarer of Truth are for the purpose of liberating and saving living beings. At times I speak as myself, sometimes as others: at times I appear as myself, sometimes as another; at times I relay my own role, sometimes I take the role of others. But in any and all cases, my Truth is full of treasured meanings.286
As the ceremony came to a close, the Tower in Sky released beautiful fragrances into the air, its aromas of wisdom permeating throughout the Perfectly Endowed Reality.
Having completed his Lotus Cosmology vision, Sakamuni thanked his innumerable Buddha-emanations for coming; released Bountiful Treasures Buddha and his tower-temple from its place in the sky; bid farewell to the 80,000 Celestial Enlightening Beings; accepted the return of the infinite numbers of Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas to the Space Below the Surface of Existence. He invited his Major Disciples and four kinds of followers to descend back to earth, told the enchanted and divine creatures to return to their lands, and bid all future guests to go forth with the treasures they had acquired.
Before departing all stood up and rejoiced.
Expressing great satisfaction with Siddhartha Gautama, they burst out into long and enthusiastic cheers.
Afterword
BABYLON AFTER THE BUDDHA
Several months after closing the Lotus ceremony, Siddhartha Gautama passed away of natural causes. He departed this world peacefully in 483 BCE, according to best estimates.
Based on the manner of departure established for all Buddhas throughout the Universe, the Buddha would depart the world leaving it to his disciples to build Treasure Towers (Skt. Stupa) within and without, the gates for entering Perfect Enlightenment. Many disciples expected that when the Buddha departed the mortal plane, he would achieve extinction in Parinirvana.
Within decades or a century following the initial efforts to record his oral sermons, some of the freeform Buddhist mendicants began to fashion into local clergies in order to engage with community life, establish temples and funerary structures, record the Buddha's teachings, and develop practices for worshipping the Buddha.
Recorded in the Nirvana Sutra, they told the story of his final days.
Beginning with a simple announcement that his life would end in three months, the Buddha camped along with his assistant Ananda in a woodlands grove near a town of householder believers. While resting there, Siddhartha Gautama reminisced about the "pleasant days" they had spent in teaching the Buddha-Dharma in various places, such as Vulture Peak and the Black Rock of Isigili. At that point, the Buddha supposedly chided Ananda that on several occasions in the past he had declared that he had the power to live in the world for an eternity. Because Ananda failed to ask him to remain in the world, as the story goes, the Buddha decided to depart.
The idea of placing blame on Ananda for the shortened mortal lifetime of the Buddha must have been added to the text of the sutra to defend against criticism that the Buddha did not live as long as the gods or the ancient patriarchs. But the premise appears contradictory to the Buddha's Doctrine of Perpetual Transience that clearly states "whatever comes into being must dissolve.'" Not once did he offer exceptions to this principle, so why would he do so before his passing? Moreover, in the Lotus Sutra, he made it clear that staying too long in this world would only cause people to become spoiled by the notion that a mortal person could become invincible or immortal.
So why did the recorders of the Nirvana Sutra want to leave the impression that he possessed the supernatural power to be immortal? Also, it seems rather unlikely that if he had wanted to remain in the world and had the power do so, that the Buddha would leave only because Ananda failed to ask him to stay.
Ironically, Sakamuni had positioned death as an essential transition in the process of evolution, not as an end. In the analogy of the Physician- Father in the Lotus Sutra the Buddha proclaimed that if he remained in the world indefinitely, human beings would become spoiled and fall into arrogant behaviors. Like the children playing in the Burning Mansion, they would become oblivious to life's lurking dangers. Sakamuni clearly established that he had no interest in going against the Universal Laws of Existence. Such an option would undermine all his efforts to lead mortal beings to a state equal to his own.
A more down-to-earth and tender perspective of his passing appears in the Nirvana Sutra. It is more likely reflective of the actual event. While local householders grieved outside his shelter at the prospect of the Buddha's impending passing, Ananda left Sakamuni's side for a few minutes and went into a private room where he wept. While understanding their emotional farewell, Sakamuni reminded all that his departure from the world should be no surprise to anyone. It was as it should be, just as he had said it would be all along.
His last words were: "Composite things are subject to vanish. Earnestly strive forth!"
In his view, the observation that nothing lasted forever provided hope, because the most likely state of being was suffering. Death, as a means of renewal, made possible the Buddha's call to evolve. In his ever-changing system of Existence the desire to aspire to higher consciousness was the critical factor that overcame death. Death was only a respite, like the Phantom City. Rather than an end, it was essential to the continuing journey towards the Place of Jewels.
His call to 'strive in earnest' was meant as encouragement to achieve Buddhahood.
However, in the centuries that followed the competition with other religions caused Buddhist clergy to frame his birth as the advent of a divine being. They would explain his death as his ascension to Parinirvana, from where he would bless believers.
This was a fairly simple idea for people to understand. By reciting his words of wisdom and worshipping the image of the Buddha, whether physical or imagined, believers sought to communicate with him and earn his blessings. In those early days, worshippers began to build various types of Buddha Towers (Skt. Stupas) to store his relics and underground temples (Skt. Vihara) to house statues of his image.
TRUE SELF
At its inception religion was deemed to be an inquiry into the mysteries of existence. Its reason-for-being coincided with the evolution of the human mind to ask questions and conceive of answers. Its founders, the shaman-seers, explored the unseen by channeling the super-conscious mind, which they entered through a trance gate in the unconscious. To articulate their visionary discoveries they used mythic language. Then with the establishment of religious institutions they linked the behavior of people, in or out of alignment with the wishes of the divine, as the basis for the stability and orderly procession of the cycles of nature. This was the basis for economic stability and social order.
Upon this foundational view, visionaries explored the relationship between cosmic order and human experiences and offered various depictions of divine cosmologies. During this formative era, religion was alive with debates. Seers spoke the same language, a mythological, spiritual and symbolic communication they used to convey their perspective of the unseen forces underlying existence.
Building upon the insights of his predecessors, the Buddha presented a cohesive vision of Existence as seen from the grand perch of his enlightened Universal-Mind—what it was, how it worked, and its purpose for being. He proposed that human beings were programmed from birth to create a sense of self out of tendencies and feedback. This "default identity" was needed for survival. But it came with a price. Consequently, he espoused the view that seeing the bigger picture of existence would liberate the mind from this limited mindset and allow a higher consciousness to emerge. Underneath the surface of the unconscious he had discovered the boundless imprint of the mind of the Universe whose purpose was to advance the evolution of mortal beings beyond the instincts of survival.
Finding the True Self in himself, he declared that all human beings were endowed with the super-conscious capacity to see a very different reality. He saw in the human mind a stratification of cognition that one could climb to see higher realities beyond the readily apparent plane of existence. He understood that ins
tinctual evolution has dominated human development, and in the next stage of their evolution humans would need to direct their intentions. To facilitate human evolutionary development, he offered the vehicle of Buddhahood as the means for the self-transformation of future generations.
Siddhartha Gautama had broken through the veil of mortality. He saw the scope, nature, and essence of existence more clearly than any human being had ever seen it, and he understood what he saw. Finally he left behind a legacy—a vision for awakening the True Self, the luminous, indestructible, and inconceivable reality of the Universal-Mind.
Soon after the completion of the Lotus Sutra assembly, he elaborated on the matter of the True Self. He described it as the everlasting, pure, and blissful "self of all living beings." The True Self (Skt. Svabhava) embodied the "essential endowment" of the Ultimate Buddha hidden within the core of every living entity.
The desire to reveal the True Self catalyzed the formless cosmic self that illuminated individuality, but was not curbed by it. The True Self was the enlightened self that all Buddhas shared. It was a free self, unencumbered by the default self, and yet it could transform the desires of the default self into the virtues of Perfect Enlightenment. The True Self could only be seen with the Eye of the Buddha.
The True Self was not a personal self, not a relative identity, nor the default self, although it was the spiritual engine underneath the hood of life. Unveiling it would infuse all mental, physical, and emotional functions with spiritual illumination. Its explanation was beyond the power of words, but its presence could be detected by quieting the instinctual chatter in the mind. While the practice of achieving quiescence was used in this regard, the Buddha distinguished this practice from the extreme of ascetic detachment, warning against the abandoning of all desires. He declared that the Field of Desire was essential to manifesting anything. For that reason he distinguished the subtle difference between the debilitating desires of the default self, which led to sorrow-producing outcomes, from the affirmative, healthy desires of the True Self to enlighten one's senses with discerning wisdom and renewing energies.
Yet because people generally could see only outcomes, or some small familiar aspect of it, he revealed that all individuals possessed an Information- body. It stored Karma, the ever-changing database of causes and effects that shaped the manifestation of individuals, their relationships, and their environment in the here and now. It included the information that determined one's appearance, abilities, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It triggered, changed, and renewed every manifestation and produced the related conditions of existence.
This information processing mechanism, as revealed by the Buddha, operated with or without the conscious awareness of its users. Most importantly, because of this system, human beings had the opportunity to access the True Self. As change was ever-present, people caught up in the cycles of suffering could either devolve into warped states or evolve into Buddhas. The power of Karma was in the hands of its user, but one had to become aware of having this power. In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha provided the One Vehicle (i.e., Lotus Cosmology ekayana), defined as a method for discovering, entering, and actualizing the original enlightenment that was endowed—without exception—to all beings in the Universal-Mind.
INSTANT ENLIGHTENMENT
The purpose of Buddhism was to inspire the evolution of human character to higher consciousness. It declared the universal opportunity for all human beings to live in peace, joy, health, and safety, and encouraged creative fulfillment. It focused on facilitating mental, emotional, and behavioral change calling for virtuous behavior and mutual respect based on the sacred dignity of life's omnipresence and its everlasting drive to renew enlightenment.
Buddhism espoused pacifism instead of wars, selflessness instead of selfishness, generosity instead of theft, healing instead of harm, and bliss instead of sorrow. It recognized and resisted the injustices in the world. But, always, Sakamuni's calls-to-action made clear that the self-motivated pursuit of higher consciousness was the solution to all challenges. Although certain interpretations of the sutras claim that the Buddha could fix all problems, if he wanted to, clearly he never embraced this externalized divine Buddha scenario, because he knew that no temporary solution would stick unless people fixed their own problems by tapping the self-transforming Buddha-source from within.
The essential premise of Buddhism was that social injustices could only be fixed at the individual level. A society was the collective reflection of individual minds. Social aberrations, such as prejudices, were the result of warped views that required change at the individual level.
Sakamuni differentiated between discernment and discrimination in addressing his male followers. He recognized that in spite of their great wisdom, most ascetics were still vulnerable to the insidiousness of pride causing elitist views. He cautioned them to be aware of this blind spot even if they had attained higher levels of consciousness. Bringing up this issue constituted a direct challenge to the caste system and the gender prejudices that developed over many centuries under the guise of religious purity.
The most glaring contradiction to the egalitarian message the Buddha espoused was the state of siege that women were under across the male-dominated cultures of his day. Their lower status had been initiated and institutionalized more than a thousand years earlier by the Old Babylonian clergy of Hammurabi. They had banished women priestesses from the clergy by citing them as the cause for the fall of the old Sumerian Gods. Thereafter, for male pursuers of soul purification misogyny became essential to the avoidance of sin.
In the elevation of the Supreme God of Babylon, Marduk, the Old Babylonians institutionalized the notion that women were a corrupting influence by having him rip apart the progenitor female goddess, the Water Dragon Tiamat, a tale adapted by the Assyrians when their God, Assur, had taken power. Again the proliferation of this storyline is apparent in the biblical Genesis story of human banishment from the Garden of Eden as a result of Eve's corruption, and this appears to have been written during the era of Judean exile in Babylon.
The adoption of this theme continued with Arya seers when their migrations passed through Babylonian territory between 1800–1000 BCE. Evidence that they embraced the prejudice against women from Babylonian influences can be found in the Rig Veda. In this narrative the god Indra ripped apart the male Water Dragon Vritra, but then he also killed its serpent mother. These violent expressions meant to banish females from religious service attached all women with the label of having inferior spiritual capacity. This concept of male spiritual superiority spread into social contexts. Women were relegated to a lower status, considered incapable of being educated, and dominated in all walks of life. In regards to their soul reincarnation, the Arya ascetics concluded that women had to be reborn as males before they could advance spiritually to purer states.
In the cultural context of the times, the hierarchical divisions established across Asian cultures from the Mediterranean to the Ganges defined females as inferior to males, children as inferior to adults, and valued civilized people above primitive ones and religious castes above secular ones.
Among the ascetics who had adopted Buddhism, advancing in their spiritual practice required rejection of hindrances such as sensory desire (Skt. kamacchanda). Accordingly, the mere presence of women could disrupt their concentration.
But this view contrasted with the Buddha's egalitarian message addressing all living beings. His acceptance of women, as well as people from all castes, into his religious community was an outright rejection of the notion that some human beings were superior over others in any way, whether because of gender, birthright, caste, culture, age, wealth, power, or appearance.
His regard for the inner capacity of human beings was never qualified or biased by prejudicial considerations, although this was not necessarily the case for his followers.
During his days in Babylon he would have witnessed men buying their wives at a public auction. The women'
s families could not refuse the highest bidder, and consequently the wealthiest men could acquire any woman they wished. The most beautiful were the most expensive, and many women became property and suffered terrible abuses. To protect their daughters from being taken away, under the watchful eye of their families many maidens became courtesans for a limited time in order to make them unappealing to prospective buyers. This practice may have been the reason for the labeling of Babylon as a wicked city full of prostitutes. In the New Testament Bible (1st century CE), the author of the apocalyptic Book of Revelations, St. John the Divine described the city as the "mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of Earth." (Revelations 17:5).
Siddhartha Gautama, on the other hand, chose to stand up to the prevailing prejudices of male-dominated religiosity. He, and only he, dared to invite women to join his community. Under the leadership of his aunt and wife a large group of women became full-time followers of the Buddha, composing one-third of all disciples. The Lotus Sutra stating that they were 6,000 strong clearly honored them for their mastery of the Six Great Virtues (Skt. Paramitas)—giving, grace, forbearance, dedication, reflection, and wisdom. Certainly, this was an expression of confidence in their ability to achieve higher consciousness.
To the credit of his male followers, the Buddhist community held together. But the most powerful test they would face regarding the spiritual capacity of women surfaced during the Ceremony of the Treasure Tower in the Sky.
While the assembly was gathering, the celestial Bodhisattva Manjusri made use of the Perfectly Endowed Reality to descend into the deep ocean where he visited the enchanted palace of Sagara, the King Water Dragon (Skt. Nagas) to inform him that the Lotus Cosmology was about to begin. Simply by overhearing him speak a few words from the preface of the Lotus Sutra, the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, the king’s eightyear- old princess daughter instantly attained Perfect Enlightenment.
